Includes bibliographical references pages 169-183) and index
1. Introduction -- 2. The Crisis in Canadian Education -- The Public Decline in Confidence -- The Curriculum under Siege -- 3. The Assault on Education -- New Directions: Destreaming, Transition Years, Learning Outcomes -- The Link to the Universities -- 4. Liberal Education and the Modern World -- Why Return to the Classics? -- Plato's Education of the Soul: Thumos, Eros, and the Dialectic of Speech -- Aristotle: Civic Paideia as a Window on the World -- Augustine: Will, Grace, and the Dynamics of Hope -- Descartes and Vico: The Sundering of Mathematics and Poetry and the Transition to Modernity -- Political Modernity and the Enlightenment -- 5. Liberal Education and the Fragmentation of Modernity -- The Longing for Wholeness and the End of History -- A Nietzschean Interlude -- 6. Liberal Education and the Canadian Polity -- The Canadian Founding -- The Founding Educators -- 7. Conclusion